I dropped out of OpenBSD entirely today, given as my baby daughter is arriving soon... and when she does, she's going to get my free time. And frankly, until then, my wife needs me too. :-) I had been maintaining a few ports; the important ones were accepted by others, and I just de-MAINTAINER'd the rest.

It's not like I'm dropping out of the free software scene entirely; because I still work on Zope at work, and am trying to push to get some more of our internal work released as free software. Oh yeah, and I'm still on the Solaris Package System, even though I am not clear on whether or not anyone else is using it. :-)

I had to move Solaris Package System to BerliOS, because of
a rather unfortunate misunderstanding with savannah. Namely,
there's a requirement that no savannah-hosted projects be
dependent on non-free software (in my case, the fact that
the software is specifically for Solaris). This requirement
was added to the requirements page just after I registered
the project, and the approver didn't inform me of the
requirement. So, I moved.

Interest in solpkg seems to be about zero right now,
although I did get some communication from some of the folks
involved in some of the current Solaris
package-distributing efforts. They were the ones who
alerted me to the dependency requirement. I'll have to see
what comes on the front...

This weekend I gained a little more Zope
enlightenment and created my first Python product. (Until
now, I'd done some work with existing Python products, but
any new stuff I needed was generally built using ZClasses
through the web.

Actually, I'm only dipping my toes in the water, only
using the Python product to provide functionality that I
can't through ZClasses (namely, I can't have manage_afterAdd
methods for two base classes both be invoked -- the first
one in the list wins) and building the rest of the product
with ZClasses. ZClasses are oft-maligned on Zope IRC, but I
think they have a definite place and are quite useful for
building simple classes.

"solpkg", the packaging system for Solaris I
mentioned earlier, will hopefully be ready for public
digestion by the end of the week and posted in its Savannahproject
area. I want to get in a hardcore reading of the
OpenBSD ports system code and figure out how it
solved some of the problems I've run into to see if they're
solvable in a similar way on Solaris first. Right now
there's some voodoo in solpkg, and I want to make sure I
understand at least my own code before I make it public.

I've found a good depressant is to go over my old diary entries and
see what I thought I could do, and discovered I couldn't, or more
likely -- let the thing drop because I have no sense of commitment.
;-)

Ah well. I recently helped bring exUserFolder into
Sourceforge CVS with a nice
little set of shell scripts I wrote that take a set of old release
tarballs and transform them into a repo with each version tagged.
It takes a long time to run over my 33.6. Watching it run
pointed out a lot of inefficiencies in the way I do things.

What else has been going on? Oh, at work I created something I
call the Solaris
Packaging System. Essentially, it's similar to OpenBSD
ports for Solaris, except it works with tools that are already part
of Solaris, GCC: GNU Compiler Collection excepted. I
wrote this because I had a collection of shell scripts that did the
same thing, except they were totally unmaintainable. :-) I'd like
to put this out but am waiting for my boss to talk to company lawyers
about whether it's acceptable to do the free software thing or not.

Any advice anyone could give on advocacy here would be nice (and
please e-mail; I don't read diaries for replies, generally)... we're
not in the software business, we're in the home interior manufacturing
business, so a lot of the existing "talking to suits" stuff doesn't
apply, really.

Oh well, that's about it. I should do the diary thing again in
another half-eon or so.

Hacked together a version of ZOracleDA
based on some old code and a little insight. Result: Oracle works with our
Zope
install here, and Zope can potentially gain a foothold over
Oracle's
really, really crappy web app server (which I am
convinced is not a result of it being based on Apache Jserv,
but is more
likely just incompetence at Oracle.)

Along those lines, Java on OpenBSD made some pretty
good progress but I seem to be up against a brick wall now.
ELF vs. a.out issues are pretty easy to patch. A ream of
assembly code that results in "invalid opcode" is not.

Well, I guess I've grown up a bit since I last posted
here, in attitude as well as ability. I'm still working on
a few ports but I'm trying to hand off the worst of them.
To that end, I've been working on porting Java to OpenBSD
based on Greg Lewis' FreeBSD port. I'm making
some steady progress in that we aren't looking at core dumps
any more, but the JVM has yet to initialize. Unfortunately
there also seems to be some shakeups in the *BSD Java port
effort, so we currently are without CVS and I don't have an
easy way to spread the changes around. If this takes much
longer I'm going to try to start up my own local CVS repo, I
guess. :-/

Found a really neat program for my Visor the other day.
Read all about it at PalmWiki (the program is
also called PalmWiki.)

Yeah, it's been awhile. I dunno, for awhile there I didn't really feel like coming back here. I was holding my
idealism a little too high, as evidenced by my bit on the certs. I've been doing a lot of thinking on a lot of things
lately, and really, the certs don't matter that much. I know who is a master and who isn't. Hell, I even have totally
different ideas than other people who certify people honestly here, just because I have different views than they do.
I know who to come to. Let the old boys' network live on; I just won't be a part of it. That doesn't make the site
less useful to me (unless everyone goes and revokes my certs today) :-)

What have I been working on lately? Not much of anything. I've actually been busy playing with Oracle's new stuff at work, and haven't really felt like coding much. libtool really confuses the hell out of me on OpenBSD (and it's currently causing some warnings in my nessus port). It seems
there is a rather large divide between BSD developers and those working on libtool; neither seems to understand
each other real well, and lots of words are flying.

Incredible. A day where there aren't any new accounts certified as journeyers already. A sea of gray. My faith in
humanity is, for today, restored.

I decided a few days ago that I would attack the following problems that I see with the OpenBSD ports tree, in this order:

Get all non-BROKEN ports to FAKE; replace IS_INTERACTIVEs with FLAVORs.

Work on infrastructure first to permit the movement of LOCALBASE to something other than /usr/local (on a
"local" basis, of course... har har), then go through each port that I can possibly build, fixing it and supplying
source patches to make it respect PREFIX and LOCALBASE appropriately.

To that end, I'm already working on #1. databases/db is my current project; I've already got an outside
contribution. And wouldn't you know it, I'm already stuck. :-) I need to try to find a way to get it to depend on the
JDK so that the java FLAVOR works appropriately. It's not as easy as it sounds, because I also need to
determine
exactly which version of the JDK was installed. I can hard-code the 1.1.8 now, but if FreeBSD's JDK (and
therefore
our port of it) ever gets updated, this port will break. Hmm.

My dream of a universal, non-GPL'd porting and packaging
system (with full path relocation, of course) taunted me again. I think, based on my forays deeper into the ports
system infrastructure, that I have a ways to go before I start such a beast.